PaulSpoerry.com

Microsoft seems to finally be getting serious about coming up with some ads that fight back against Apple. I mean let’s face it, Apple’s advertising has always been stellar but the latest round of the Mac vs PC ads were just genius. While MS’s ads aren’t quite as “fun” they do seem to be attacking Apple at the “core” (lol) of the differences between the two computing platforms.

The “Laptop Hunter” commercials have a simple concept. Shoppers are offered a free computer, if they can find one within their budgets and that meets their other priorities. Giampaolo’s criteria: “portability, battery life and I’m looking for power,” all for under $1,500. Giampaolo describes himself as technically savvy and someone who likes to customize a PC.

He begins his search with Windows PCs, but briefly looks at Macs. “This is so-o-o sexy,” he says while picking up a MacBook.”But Macs to me are about ascetics more than they are the computing power. I don’t want to pay for the brand. I want to pay for the computer.”

Check out the ad:

Ok a couple things to point out here… if you want the breakdown on the machines check out this Microsoft Watch article which does a detailed break down on the hardware this guy looked at. While this ad is effective, my only bitch about it is that if Giampaolo were technically savvy (aka a geek) then he would have known exactly what he wanted from the very beginning. He would have researched them on the net. The MacBook wouldn’t even have been a consideration because he already knew what his needs were. Of course… that would make for a short commercial.

Undoubtedly every web-designer and developer who as made any attempt to use CSS will have found a situation where different web-browsers require different style statements. I’ve just encountered this myself with a side project I’ve been working on. This irritation is due to the varying degree of completeness of the CSS implementation across browsers and browser versions.

Conditional-CSS is a solution to this problem, taking the idea of the conditional comment syntax from Internet Explorer and placing it inline with your CSS statements.

Conditional-CSS is something you need to install on your server to be able to use. It comes in three platform versions:

PHP -Very simple to install and portable to any platform that runs PHP – the right option for you if you want to give Conditional-CSS a go.

C – Exceedingly fast and will run on just about every *nix platform, this is a little tricker to install, but very useful as a global interpreter.

C# -Runs under .NET 2.0 in Windows and Mono on many other platforms, use this version if you are using IIS or a .NET based web-server.

Get Conditional-CSS here.